UX RESEARCH • GROWTH DESIGN • UI DESIGN
Turning locked lessons from a pain point into a conversion opportunity.
Babbel | Q1 2025 | Product Designer
In this case study, I share how I identified a gap in Babbel’s Lead experience and navigated technical constraints to implement a solution.
I led the initiative to turn a conversion pain point into a 3% revenue uplift.
Summary
Problem
Leads don’t buy the Babbel subscription because they aren’t able to complete more than 1 lesson in the freemium experience.
Solution
Designed a locked lesson page to showcase what users will learn both within the first lesson and once they unlock more lessons through subscription.
My role
UX Research • Design Strategy • UI Design
Impact: + 3% in selected revenue metric 📈
Context
Our team was formed in Q3 2024 with a clear focus: driving revenue by improving the Lead experience in the Babbel app. To better understand the problem space, I searched for relevant studies in our research repository. The existing research insights were outdated and not actionable, so I pitched, designed and lead the research of the Lead experience which was pivotal in shaping strategic initiatives within this space.
Chapter 1
Generative Research
At the start, the Lead space felt broad and unclear: we had little insight to work with and risked chasing every stakeholder assumption. Together with a UX Research Intern that I mentored, we focused our efforts on two core questions:
Who are our Leads?
What do they need to experience in order to convert?
With these clear objectives, we conducted 5 user interviews.
What we learned:
The Problem
Leads want to experience more than one lesson before making a decision to subscribe, because they want to see how the learning experience evolves over time.
Constraints
An obvious direction to take would be to unlock more lessons within the freemium experience. Due to technical and staffing constraints, we couldn’t expand the freemium access to more lessons. This pushed us to explore alternatives that could still meet the same user needs, but within our team’s technical capabilities.
Chapter 2
Competitor analysis
Locking content behind a paywall is a common practice among our competitors. Looking at their solutions we realised that we can still showcase the information our Leads are missing without unlocking the lessons. This is how the Locked Lesson Page experiment idea was born. Leads didn’t necessarily need more lessons, but they wanted to see more overview of what to expect from the overall learning experience.
Chapter 3
Ideation & explorations
My explorations were informed by results of a survey which helped identify what information about the learning experiences is most relevant for Leads. I wanted to make sure that the page included the information Leads will find most useful while considering a subscription.
The north star vision was to draw inspiration from e-commerce and design a product page for a language lesson. The goal was to find a solution balancing clarity with minimalism, presenting information to provide clarity without overwhelming the learners.
Chapter 4
Evaluative research
The insights from our discovery process presented 2 areas with an even amount of evidence in research:
Learning plan - people want to know what they will learn in upcoming lessons.
Vocabulary - people are excited to know what specific vocabulary they will learn within the lesson.
Since including both would make the page too overwhelming, I conducted a preference test to understand which section would better support the decision-making around subscription.
The research showed that 75% of Leads preferred the learning plan overview. Participants who preferred this design stated that it allows them to see the overall value they will get from learning with Babbel in the long run.
Chapter 5
Final designs
The final designs included all the information necessary for a Lead to evaluate their mid- to long-term learning experience with Babbel. The information like duration, skills, topic of the lesson as well as the following lessons in the unit were all carefully selected based on the insights from our research.
Chapter 6
Results & learnings
The experiment has shown a 3% uplift in the key revenue metric, proving that surfacing the right information at the right moment helps learners make a decision to subscribe.
Chapter 7
Personal learnings
This project has taught me about the power of pivoting and utilizing various research techniques within a project. Additional learnings I will incorporate into my design process are:
Leverage early engineering collaboration - this project required a closely knit collaboration with our engineers. It involved fetching lots of lesson data which was not always accessible without looking into code. Working closely with an engineer to get that information was invaluable and I’m planning to take this practice into my future projects.
Don’t reinvent the wheel - competitor analysis can definitely serve as a great tool for benchmarking, but for me its main strength is finding already existing solutions to the problems I’m facing. It’s not as straightforward as copying the exact solution, but it can spark ideas which can unblock the problem-solving process.
Up next
Improving paywall performance through intentional UI enhancements.
If you’re interested in UI-driven impact, this project is for you.